For personalized education big data is a must

According to computer scientist Nuria Oliver, there are three main key elements regarding big data in education, being the first one the so promised personalization, so that teachers could get precise information of how students are doing and thus adapt their methodology to specific needs. Secondly, large scale data could also be extremely useful for official statistics: e.g., how a city, a specific region or even a whole country is doing in terms of education. And, finally, we also need to make sure students’ data is securely stored and kept under high privacy standards. We would like to thank the TEDxBarcelona Education event for this contribution.

« Technology can offer us much finer grain information about the progress of students so that each student is able to learn at his/her own pace, using his/her preferred way of learning and thus realize his/her full potential »

Every day we generate a huge amount of big data, but we need to resort to analytics to make abstract information meaningful and get valuable knowledge from it. In education, learning platforms let us easily gather an immense quantity of data regarding students’ behaviour, interactions, preferences and opinions. When properly analysed — through learning analytics — all these data might provide useful insight on how to make learning processes more adaptive, attractive and efficient.

Are these techniques allowing us to provide better support to our students? Are we taking advantage of big data and analytics to help shape the citizens of the future?